2.11. Strange things happen when I boot the install floppy!

If you're seeing things like the machine grinding to a halt or spontaneously rebooting when you try to boot the install floppy, here are three questions to ask yourself:-

1. Did you use a new, freshly-formatted, error-free floppy (preferably a brand-new one straight out of the box, as opposed to the magazine coverdisk that's been lying under the bed for the last three years)?
2. Did you download the floppy image in binary (or image) mode? (don't be embarrassed, even the best of us have accidentally downloaded a binary file in ASCII mode at least once!)
3. If you're using one of these new-fangled operating systems like Windows95 or Windows NT, did you shut it down and restart the system in plain, honest DOS? It seems these OS's can interfere with programs that write directly to hardware, which the disk creation program does; even running it inside a DOS shell in the GUI can cause this problem.

There have also been reports of Netscape causing problems when downloading the boot floppy, so it's probably best to use a different FTP client if you can.